Are you looking to ensure the accuracy and relevancy of your knowledge base? Then conducting an audit of your articles is a great way to do that.
By understanding your knowledge base's purpose and analyzing existing articles, you can improve its organization, prevent redundant content, and identify links between related topics.
Auditing your self-service platform will not only help you leverage the knowledge collected from employees, vendors, partners, customers, and other stakeholders more efficiently but it will also save you from re-working or creating knowledge articles in the future.
Audit knowledge base with this article so that you can maximize the value of your assets.
Identifying Gaps in Existing Content
The first step in your auditing project is to assess the existing categories for specific areas. Taking a closer look at articles helps you identify any gaps and how topics are interrelated.
Reviewing Content for Accuracy and Relevance
Sorting through your company's knowledge base and auditing it for accuracy and relevance is an important task.
Start by looking at a specific article you want to check, so that you have a clear focus on what you're assessing.
After skimming the content to check for typos or unclear language, check not just the hard facts, but also that the information provided is up-to-date with the latest changes.
Finally, review each topic for its relevance — does it answer customer questions or provide helpful information?
Analyzing Search Results to Determine Missing Topics
An essential part of managing self-service resources is keeping detailed records on what topics have already been covered.
Conducting an audit to analyze search queries can be incredibly useful in determining what topics are missing from the knowledge base. By pouring over existing articles and looking at user trends, you can discover which subject areas don't have much support or coverage.
Ask yourself questions like:
"What topis do customers typically search for that aren't answered?"
or
"Are there any common questions or requests for information that we're not addressing?"
Look even deeper to identify areas where the documentation might be outdated or missing. An analysis of search queries is a great way to recognize knowledge gaps and provide users with the answers they need.
Monitoring Customer Reviews for Feedback
When running an audit of your knowledge base, customer reviews can be an invaluable source of valuable insight into missed opportunities and areas you may want to feature more prominently.
Keeping track of customer reviews will alert you to any deficiencies or weak points in what is being offered, enabling you to make the necessary adjustments to continue improving the overall quality of the experience.
Monitoring customer reviews on a regular basis allows you to get ahead of potential customer issues and respond quickly when needed, giving customers a sense that their opinions matter and their voices are heard.
Taking all this into account can have a positive effect on customer retention as it prime example that consistently striving for betterment in what is already provided matters.
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Creating a Strategy for Improving Current Content
It's all well and good to assess the knowledge base and identify areas for improvement, but this knowledge is useless until you come up with a plan of action that specifies how to address these issues.
Creating an audit strategy should be seen as a long-term commitment that requires active monitoring and frequent updates. This will involve identifying knowledge gaps, updating existing content, and possibly writing new knowledge base articles.
Make sure that you factor in the necessary resources and time to get it all done — if not, you risk being overwhelmed with too much change for too little gain.
Establishing Goals and Objectives
A knowledge base audit is the process of evaluating a particular body of data to ensure its accuracy and effectiveness.
To set up successful goals and objectives for such an audit, it is important to create an audit log that captures quantitative metrics, such as the number of articles, customers served, error rates, etc.
Additionally, all labor costs associated with preparing and auditing the data should also be catalogued in order to determine any areas which require additional resources or need further support.
If you want to dive deeper into measuring your articles, consider reading our article on knowledge base metrics.
Developing Guidelines for Ongoing Maintenance
After the audit has been conducted, the next step is developing guidelines for ongoing maintenance of your knowledge base.
To start, conduct a meeting with the project members present to discuss best practices for keeping records up to date, such as designating an oversight team that will routinely review and update content accordingly. Keep track of modifications or changes made with regular reports on progress and performance, ensuring all information is current. This provides clarity and consistency over time so that accessing the knowledge base later on stays accurate and reliable.
Having these guidelines in place helps ensure that your knowledgebase continues to remain organized at all times.
Utilizing Automated Tools to Monitor Content Quality
Automated tools can greatly simplify the job of monitoring content quality, removing the time-consuming element of manually checking each article and giving users a quick view of how their resource is performing.
KnowledgeBase provides several reporting features that make it ideal for content analysis:
- Article ratings allow you to quickly review and adjust content pieces with lower scores.
- Through reports and insights, you can access crucial performance metrics and plan your updates accordingly.
- With integrated Google Analytics capabilities, you can identify popular posts offering helpful advice, as well as underperforming pieces that need a revamp to improve readability and user experience.
These are just a few of the many best practices for knowledge base auditing, and with them, you should be able to make sure that your self-service platform is up-to-date and comprehensive for your customers.
Conclusion
Are you looking to increase your organization's capacity for knowledge sharing? Then KnowledgeBase is the perfect solution for you! With our powerful tool, you can easily set up a knowledge base and make it immediately available to your team. Best of all, it's free--just sign up and we'll give you 14 days of trial access without needing a credit card upfront--so don't hesitate to get started today!
Put knowledge to work
Knowledge base software for lightning-fast customer support and effortless self-service.
Trusted by 2,500+ companies
